Knowledge
Around the ruin of Father Pereth’s office, Isabel has constructed a wall of books.
It’s really more of a low fence, three or four books high, depending on thickness. She stacked them haphazardly at first, but that prompted probing investigations from glowing tendrils and many-jointed fingers. Now, church records, illuminated manuscripts, and typeset prayer books stand in neat rows like bricks in a wall. She adds one more at the edge of the gap, a bound copy of the Kalusandr Scrolls, and winces as the already yellowed pages make contact with the heavy, damp air.
If this works, and this defense holds long enough for someone to find a way to send the thing beyond the wall back to the undreamt-of abyss from whence it came, all these books will be ruined. Centuries of church doctrine and millennia of history are only as durable as paper and ink. How can the church rebuild when all their knowledge is covered in mildew and mud?
It’s more important to save the people, she reminds herself. Knowledge survives when people do. What use are books in an empty city?
A small, terrible thought, sharp and cold as a needle, says that it’s perhaps for the best that the church—the buildings as well as the ancient institution—might not last the day. The Temple of Ondir closed its doors to the lost and displaced, and offered no comfort to either the living or the dead. The Temple of Isra bandaged the wounded and fed the hungry, but they’ve been overrun, while a priest of Alcos offers empty platitudes and promises that dead gods cannot fulfill.
The church will shortly follow the Seven into death—or whatever is coming for them, because without Ondir, can it really be called death? In the meantime, all the knowledge of generations of continental scholars, mostly compiled by monks, is delaying the end just a little longer.
It makes sense, in a way: these orderly descriptions of the world, written in careful lines and bound by skillful hands, are keeping chaos and destruction back. It won’t last forever. Everything succumbs to mold, worms, and dust. A not-quite Sentinel, kneeling in the ruins of the temple of Ondir, knows that better than most.
Isabel stands up and brushes dust from her hands. Her fortification covers the two missing walls of Pereth’s office in a neat semicircle of books. Beyond them, the wall of bone still stands, though it’s decaying by the minute. A crack shatters the fog, and a pair of skulls roll down to shatter on the ground outside the temple. She had expected the thing to come pouring out of the gap behind where the empty bookshelves still stand, but it only probes at the opening with tendrils that wave like grass in the wind. The fish-egg cluster of eyes has gone elsewhere, and a single eye, huge and red with a horizontal slit of a pupil, watches Isabel’s every step.
“Now for the rest of the temple,” she says, mostly to herself.
If she can find every book, pamphlet, and grocery list in the city, could she fortify the whole Temple District? The office, as it is, holds only Isabel, Father Pereth, four other priests, and six novices, and she only has enough space to walk the length of her wall of books. She suspects there aren’t any more people in the temple, not after the dead attacked.
And then there are the ghosts.
They drift across the office like flotsam caught in a tide, murmuring like waves passing over a rocky shore. One, a young boy with a ragged hole where his left arm should be, sits beside the door, close to one of the novices. The living boy has turned gray with fear. He curls his shoulders in and draws his knees up to his chest, his eyes as round as dinner plates as he tries very hard not to look at the ghost.
Once, Isabel was afraid of the dead, too, but they didn’t walk around then, visible as daylight. They had to be called up and addressed by name. In the world before, the novice would eventually learn to do it, and see that the dead aren’t much different from the living.
“Mother, help me, I’m lost in the woods,” the ghost boy says. “Mother me help, in lost I’m.”
They’re not quite like the living; not anymore. They’ve seen something, and they can’t say what it was—if they can even speak, which more and more of the ghosts drifting in from elsewhere in the city can’t. The room flickers with the broken lights of the partially devoured.
Isabel rubs at her eyes. She’s so tired. Even if she wanted to, and if there wasn’t a monstrosity from the unknown void pressing up against her flimsy barricade, there isn’t enough room to lie on the floor and sleep. Besides, the ghosts are too noisy, singing nonsense songs or screaming wordlessly. The living, on the other hand, are quiet.
She needs more books, and she needs more space. She crosses the room and throws open the office door.
“Where are you going?” Father Pereth asks. He’s recovered some of his faculties, and has emerged from under his desk to stand beside the door, his arms stiff and awkward at his sides. He moves to block Isabel’s path, but he keeps his eyes down, so as not to look at the open walls of his office and what lies beyond them.
“This isn’t enough room for everyone,” says Isabel. “I want to cover the whole temple, at least.”
Pereth glances up for the barest fraction of a second. “Cover it in books?”
“Encircle it in books. It’s the best I can do.”
“It does seem to be working,” Pereth says with a sigh. “Some of those volumes are priceless.”
Isabel nods, closing her eyes. It’s a brief respite from the confusion of flickering white light against the dull red backdrop of the sky. “I know.”
“You’re going to get more books?” Pereth asks.
“More books,” Isabel says, “more people.” Why won’t he get out of her way? If she doesn’t keep moving, she wants to tell him, she’ll fall asleep where she’s standing and be of no use to anyone. It wouldn’t be true, as she’s always slept lightly, but the useless part might turn out to be accurate.
Pereth blinks at her. “More people? Why?”
Now it’s Isabel’s turn to stare. What does he mean, why? “To…to save them,” she says. “The whole city will be gone before long.”
“How many?” Pereth asks.
It sounds like a genuine question, but Isabel doesn’t have an answer. She’s been breathing in dust for an hour or more, and her head aches. “As many as I can,” she says. She turns to the side and tries to edge her way around the high priest.
He takes a step back, putting himself back in her path. “It’s not safe. There are a hundred spirits in here, Miss Rainier. If one person were to die and leave a body—”
Isabel’s hands come up, but she stops herself before she puts them over her ears. “I know, I know,” she says, high and strained. “But it’s worse for them out there. You haven’t seen it.” You’ve been in here the whole time, waiting for the gods to save you, and I’m all you have to show for it.
“My responsibility is to this church,” Pereth says. “I can’t let you endanger us.”
“We’re already in danger,” argues Isabel. “And I can’t gather up enough books on my own.”
He scowls, twisting his pale face into a thin, fearful imitation of stern disapproval. He knows he doesn’t have any power over her. “Very well,” he says, and steps out of the doorway.
As soon as Isabel is in the corridor, the door slams shut behind her. She jumps, taking in a sharp breath. She half-turns, afraid it’s been locked and Pereth’s desk dragged in front of it again to keep her out, but it doesn’t really matter. She’ll pile books under the dome, on the temple stairs, in the street—wherever she happens to be.
And what are you going to do after that? she asks herself for perhaps the tenth time today. Even books won’t hold that thing back forever.
She doesn’t know. She does know that the wall of bone is crumbling, and the wall of stone is coming closer with each passing hour. She needs time, and that’s what the books will give her.
The corridor echoes with her footsteps. Despite the office door remaining closed, an autumn draft has taken up residence inside the temple. Isabel wraps her borrowed coat around her and quickens her pace.
Whatever happened to Berend? She was supposed to meet him at the Temple of Isra, and there’s no way she’s getting there anytime soon. She hopes he isn’t there waiting for her.
She finds she misses him. He has a particular way of making the end of the world sound like a minor inconvenience. More than that, he trusts her—or at least, he’s willing to believe that she’s not trying to make everything worse, which is more than she can say for Father Pereth. All her years of service mean nothing to him.
She’d be angry about it, but she’s too tired, and she doesn’t have time. She hurries through the ruin of the temple, under the dome where the pews have been hacked apart to bar the temple’s doors and fight back the horde of walking dead. Splinters crunch under her boots. The room is filled with dim red light, reflecting off the scattering of unmarked, varnished surfaces left on the marble floor.
The main doors are still barricaded. A single, mostly untouched bench stands there like a pair of faithful watchmen. Isabel puts both hands under one side and gives it an experimental tug. It’s far too heavy for her to lift on her own, but she can drag one end, step by step, away from the door. The noise is a painful combination of wood scraping against stone, the bench’s joints creaking, and three earsplitting shrieks in rapid succession where varnish and floor wax meet.
That done, Isabel opens the temple door.
She meets resistance, at first—the people who have been waiting on the steps since this morning, their dead wrapped in bedsheets, have understandably taken to leaning against the door that wouldn’t open. Once they notice what’s happening, they shift down the stairs, crowding into their neighbors.
Isabel looks outside and finds herself face-to-face with a woman about her age. She has dirt on her face, and her apron and the cuffs of her sleeves are stained with old blood. She grasps the door with strong, calloused hands and opens it the rest of the way.
“Who are you?” she asks. Clearly, she was expecting a black-robed priest, as were the three dozen other faces that turn toward Isabel.
Up the hill, by the temples of Alcos and Isra, the crowd is less docile. Isabel can’t see much in the dim crimson glow of the evening; only torches, pressing up against the barricades keeping them inside the Temple District and away from the city center. Indistinct shouting fills the district and echoes from the high walls of the more elegant temples. The priest of Alcos is gone, probably fled for a safer place indoors.
In the distance, a gunshot cracks through the noise. A scream follows, and the crowd grows louder in surprise and protest.
The people on the steps of the temple of Ondir, briefly distracted, turn back to Isabel. They’re waiting.
“I’m a Sentinel,” she says. “Come inside, quickly. Stay quiet. And give me any books you have.”
We are hurtling toward the conclusion. If you’re enjoying The Book of the New Moon Door, the published version will release December 15, and there will be opportunities to preorder before then. Tell your friends!
As always, thanks for reading.
Space Whales Press 
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